Possibility: Wrong Decision
by Mystic83
Summary: What if Starbuck’s decision to bump Apollo’s Viper and land them both in Galactica herself wasn’t the right one to make? What if it had been fatal? (Events take place during the end of the miniseries)


Author's note: This will be a series of stand-alone stories which deal with the choices that the characters on Battlestar Galactica have made throughout the mini-series and first season (I'll be posted in as much of the order of the season as I can). I want to explore what would have happened/changed if things had gone differently. Some of the stories will be angst, some will be shippy, some will be funny. There will be different pairings throughout. Don't feel like you have to check out each one to understand the others. All I ask is that if it intrigues you, then give it a try. Hope you enjoy reading the stories as much as I enjoyed writing them!

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There are pivotal moments in one's life where if you take the wrong path everything may change. Those changes may be for the good or for the bad. The possibilties are endless.

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Kara Thrace looked out the side panel of the Mark II she was flying. The remainders of the once large fleet loomed behind her. This small, insignificant action of turning to look out the window had been so easy for her once. But then that was back when she could see out of both eyes. Now she just wore an itchy eye patch that pissed her off more than it did any good.

"It fits nicely with the scars, though" she said to herself. Even though there was no way she could feel them, she lifted her hand up to trace the inch long scars which cut across her left cheek from ear to nose. The skin still tingled slightly when she thought about the crash. That had been a particularly bad battle with ten Cylon Raiders. She had taken them all out, though, and found a fresh supply of water in the process. So maybe it hadn't been completely bad.

She flew another circle around Galactica and the half dozen civilian ships still devoted to it. There was not much of the Fleet left for her to protect. There wasn't much of humanity left to save. They were it. About four thousand people. They were the last hope.

Commander Adama had promised them Earth a long time ago, but for some reason, they could not find the way. She herself had stopped believing they would ever find a place to rest a long time ago. Her mind flashed back to the patrol sweep she had done a few minutes ago. They were definitely not where they should be.

They had almost run out of tylium completely two days earlier. Their only shot of surviving was on the dumb luck that they had stalled somewhere near a source of fuel. Before she could even register what was happening, they had a tylium detector strapped to her wing and wired into her systems, and she was in the air, making detection sweeps of all surrounding rocks and craters. She hadn't rested in forty-nine hours.

It felt good to be in the air.

Her rare, calm mood was quickly interrupted by a voice blaring through her cockpit. "Starbuck, Galactica Actual. It appears like we're clear. Your scans aren't picking up anything useful. You should come in and get some rack time."

It still startled Starbuck to hear the Commander's voice in her ear. Dee had always been the one to relay the commands, but she hadn't been around since the Battle of Medira six months earlier. "Stupid ice planet," she mumbled to herself. They hadn't realized the atmosphere was so unstable until it was too late. The patrol consisting of two Raptor pilots, a few of the deck crew, the president's personal aide, and Petty Officer Dualla had suffocated within seconds of stepping off their ship.

"Repeat, Starbuck. I didn't hear you."

"I said let me make one more pass, sir. There's no tylium that I can see, but I still have a bad feeling about our security. I think it would be best to keep me up in the air for a little while longer." She hoped he couldn't pick up on the fact that she was withholding information.

"Request granted. Don't stay out there all day."

Kara shook her head. The old man had gotten lax in the past few weeks. He was missing the normal warning signs in her behavior that screamed she was up to no good. If there was still a brig to be thrown into, she probably would have already been there two days ago. "Understood, Galactica Actual."

As the channel closed, she let out the breath she hadn't known she was holding. It was always hard to talk to the Commander. He didn't treat her any differently since the day she had killed his son, but sometimes, she could just feel his accusatory stare on her.

She absentmindedly slid off a glove to play with her eye patch. There were no Cylons in view, so she figured a little slip in protocol wouldn't hurt. Plus, this thing was really starting to piss her off with all the itching and the irritating.

It had taken her months to get used to the complete loss of sight in her left eye. She had been incredibly angry, bordering on irrational, when she had first been told that she was slowly going blind. It hadn't helped that the next thing the doctor said was there was no way she could fly in her condition. True to form, she hadn't listened to him. She was made for the sky, and she knew that. It was the only place she intended to be when it was her time to leave this life.

She glanced down at her bare hand. The dog tags she usually kept tucked inside the arm of her flight suit were falling out. She lightly traced the numbers etched into the souvenir handed to each pilot to mark their graduation from the Academy. 9431883. One digit less than the numbers etched on her own dog tags which hung around her neck. He had always been one step behind her.

She rolled the thin piece of metal between her fingers as her mind flashed back to the last time she had seen them on the man to which they belonged.

There was smoke and fire all around her, and she was pretty sure she had a concussion. Her head had smacked the side of the cockpit a little too hard for her liking. The helmet had taken most of the impact, but it still hurt like a bitch. There was a steady beeping that would have signaled a problem if she didn't already know that her Viper was about as frakked as it could be. The beeping definitely didn't help her head, though.

Something inside her kept telling her to get moving and keep moving. To not give up the fight. So she pulled herself out of the beaten Viper, casting her helmet to the side, and fell down to the hanger ground with a thud. She had forgotten how high off the ground the cockpit was.

Lying on the ground, she watched people rush back and forth from one Viper to the next, trying to contain the damage. There was a nagging voice in her ear, yelling about what a stupid move head butting another Viper had been. It took her a moment to realize that it wasn't just a voice in her head.

She had to give the Chief credit for having the balls to stand up to her. Not many people would take on the almighty Starbuck, especially when she was in a bad way. Congratulations would have to wait for another time, however.

First, she had to find Lee.

She scanned the hanger for his presence but couldn't see him anywhere.

They had come into the bay pretty hard. He had warned her about that.

Suddenly it occurred to her that he might have been really hurt by the crash. Maybe the doctor had ordered him to go straight to sick bay. Maybe he was lying in a bed somewhere. It just kept ringing through her head. He might be hurt. He might be hurt. He might be hurt.

He needs you.

But she couldn't just run away from the crash. There were too many people working too hard to fix the mess she had made for her to just run away without a thought. She wasn't sure what she could do, though. Nothing too helpful, that was for sure. Her head pounded as she tried to focus on coming up with something.

She remembered her helmet had been flung aside in her cockpit. She could go get that. Then the XO wouldn't have her ass for letting scarce equipment be destroyed. Yeah, she could save her helmet from being burned. That was something she could do.

Glad that someone had had the sense to move a ladder over to her Viper, she lifted her way up, ignoring the throbbing pain that was still ringing through her head. The climbing was a lot simpler than she would have expected. She leaned over the side of the plane as she fought to keep her balance and grab the helmet. Her head was really in bad shape..

She didn't know what made her look up at the damaged plane next to hers at that exact moment. But she did.

Lee was sitting in his cockpit, just staring at her with a blank look in his eyes. She couldn't understand why he wasn't moving, why he wasn't desperately trying to get the hatch to go up so that he could get out of the plane and yell at her for being so insane. She should be down on the ground, enjoying a good temper tantrum from her CAG. Why wasn't he scowling at her for being so stupid that she got him stuck in a plane? He just had that blank look on his face.

And he wasn't blinking.

He wasn't...

Her eyes caught on the dog tags hanging around his neck, just as lifeless and unmoving as him.

Only later would she understand that the scream she heard at that moment was her own.

Kara shook her head, trying to throw the memories off. That was all she really could do when every moment of her life was spent trying to forget the fact that she killed her best friend. She just tried to push it to the side and get her job done.

To this day she still wondered if she should just have left him out there floating in space where his engine had given out. Maybe death by a Cylon gunshot would have been quicker than the hell she put him through in their Viper crash that day. Maybe he would have figured out a way to get back to Galactica on his own without her "help". Maybe the Fleet would have been in better shape if she had just left him in space and made her way back to the Battlestar. Maybe then she wouldn't have gotten the concussion which led to her losing her sight.

Her life was just chock full of maybes.

She was frakking tired of it.

"Galactica Actual?" she said, turning on the comm frequency again.

"What do you hear, Starbuck?"

"Nothing, sir." She could hear him hesitate as he wondered why she had altered their routine slightly. "I have a something I need to tell you."

"If this is about Zak, Kara, I know. And this is not the time to be getting into that. It's ancient history. There are more important things to concentrate now."

"No. It's more about Lee than it is about Zak." She waited for a response but got none. "Sir, I saw something on my patrol. A Cylon base. The Cylon base, I'm fairly certain."

"Get back here now before they see you," the voice in her ear insisted. "We can mount an attack as soon as you land."

"Mount an attack with what, sir? We have no nukes, and there's only one other functional Viper left besides the piece of junk I'm currently piloting."

"Get back in here, Kara. That's an order."

True to form, she made a split-second decision. "I'm sorry for everything, Commander. I never meant to kill either of your sons. Consider this my apology to you." She pulled her Viper up so that she was no longer in range of the radio.

It surprised her to realize that her mind was with Lee and not Zak at a moment like this. She was about to fly to where no other pilot had been, and all she could think about is what her best friend would say if he knew what she was about to do.

"He'd tell me I was beyond insane," she said with a smile as she pushed the thrusters down. "And then he would shoot out my engines so that I couldn't do what I intended."

Lee had always watched out for her as long as she could remember. He wouldn't let her do something as stupid as take on a Cylon base ship all by her lonesome. However, if he couldn't stop her, then he wouldn't hesitate to fly by her side. That was the kind of relationship they had.

Lee's face as she last saw it suddenly appeared in her mind.

The memory of his blue eyes as he realized she refused to leave him to die by himself that day two years earlier was the only thing she could see now. His look that day had been so shocked and grateful for what she was willing to risk. She had never forgotten it.

In a few short moments, she would have those eyes on her once more, lords of Kobol willing.

"I'm coming, Lee," she whispered as the base grew larger in front of her. She could see the launch of a whole squadron of Raiders.

The idea of what she was about to do made her want to laugh. She was humanity's savior. A tomboy who had grown up thinking the only way to stay alive was to stay suffering. The most reckless pilot in the Fleet who knew that one day she would make a reckless decision to get herself killed. The murderer of the Commander's two sons who knew that karma was waiting to come back around on her. A pilot with only half her vision and none of her senses who couldn't seem to get a certain pair of baby blues out of her mind.

As she dodged artillery shots and Cylon Raiders, she switched her mind over to autopilot. It had always been easier to fly when she knew it was a matter of survival. Strangely enough, she felt no anger for what she felt she had to do. Instead there was just a feeling of peace. Her mind flashed to a memory of a time she had all but forgotten.

Her first birthday at the Academy had been the day she had almost flunked out for drunk and disorderly. She was stuck in hack for three whole hours before they realized the fight hadn't been her fault. No one came to see her. No one tried to help iron out the misunderstanding.

Lee had snuck into her bunkroom that night and pulled her, half-asleep, into one of the side gardens. She could see the memorial built to commemorate pilots fallen in battle during the first Cylon War shining in the moonlight. He had apologized for not being able to get a hold of her earlier to wish her a happy birthday and presented her with a small feast.

It was the best birthday she had ever had and the first moment in her life that she understood what it was like to know someone in the world actually cares for you. It was the first time she ever felt at peace with herself.

The memory of his smiling face on that night was the last thing she saw as her Viper flew closer to the large wall of metal in front of her.

"Humanity's last hope," she whispered, thinking of Lee.

And then there was nothing.


End file.
